Category: Healthcare

In July of this year, Texas Monthly, an Austin publication that chronicles contemporary life among the elite in Texas, continued its tradition of identifying and honoring the best of the best in the medical field. Nine Austin Regional Clinic physicians representing six specialties were selected and honored with the title of Texas Super Doctor. These nine super stars because of their experience and expertise and the high quality of care they provide their patients have earned the respect and recognition of their peers for the year 2015.

40,000 medical professionals in Texas participate in the selection of the state’s top doctors. Each doctor nominates one or more doctors other than himself by answering one telling and very astute question: “If you needed medical care in one of the following specialties, which doctor would you choose?” Selected by Key Professional Media, Inc. and the publishers of Texas Monthly, the selection of the top doctors is also based on an evaluative review of the nominated doctors’ years of experience, board certification, hospital appointments, fellowships, professional activities, academic achievements and positions, publications, and honors and awards.

One winner of this year’s coveted award is Dr. Jennifer Walden. Dr. Walden, a board certified plastic surgeon, is a local girl who did good. Born in Austin to parents who were also medical professionals, Dr. Walden early on was destined for greatness. Also honored this year by Harper’s Bazaar as one of America’s Best Beauty Surgeons, Jennifer Walden a graduate of Anderson High School was an all state soccer player, an honor graduate of the University of Texas Austin with a Bachelor of Arts in Biology, and Salutatorian of her graduating class at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

After completing her residency training, Dr. Walden moved to New York to pursue her special interest in aesthetic surgery. She honed her skills there for over eight years before returning home to be close to family. A philanthropist, a scholar, and a mom Dr. Walden has made a difference in lives the world over because of her compassion and her skills as a surgeon.

To be a top doctor in Texas is no small feat. These physicians embody the expertise, dedication, and skills that are hallmarks of a good doctor. Dr. Walden and others like her promote health and well-being through a comprehensive and personalized approach to health care that is satisfying to the soul.

Eric Lefkofksy has made a name for himself as one of the Chicago area’s most successful tech entrepreneurs. After having founded Groupon, an innovative company that uses the power of volume purchasing to get group discounts for people in disperse locations across the country, he went on to found a series of other highly successful companies. But then his wife was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer in 2013.

Over the course of the next year, Lefkofsky accompanied his wife to her medical appointments. He was distraught to find out that, often times, oncologists had less access to quality data than did truck drivers or salesmen. He was also surprised to discover the extent to which modern cancer treatments still take a one-size-fits-all approach. If companies like Amazon are capable of generating pages that are highly customized to a user’s preferences, why couldn’t oncology, with the billions and billions spent on it each year, do the same? He set out to research what the answers to those questions were.

Eventually, he came to the conclusion that no single package existed for oncological use that drew from all of the crucial sources of medical data and combined that data into a useful output. In 2016, Lefkofsy founded Tempus, a company dedicated to creating custom analytics for oncologists, enabling the most powerful information available to be put into the clinical setting, in real time.

Tempus makes use of many data sources, including electronic medical records and scientific research papers. But the most important source of the data that the Tempus system relies on is the human genome itself. Lefkofsky explains that the cost of sequencing a single person’s genome has dropped precipitously over the last 14 years. In the year 2003, when the first full human genome was sequenced, the cost was a whopping $100,000,000. Fast forward 14 years and that price tag has plummeted to just $5,000, a 20,000-fold decrease. Eric Lefkofksy projects that number will fall to just a couple hundred dollars in the coming decade.

At such low prices, it will become commonplace for people to have their genome sequenced. Tempus will make optimal use of this data.

Shiva Gopal Vasishta is a licensed doctor in New Jersey who practices neurology and psychiatry at the Eastern Neurodiagnostic Associates he also works closely with Kennedy Health System Cherry Hill Campus. He studied and graduated with a medical degree from the government medical college in 1979. He undertook a medical resident program at Boston University medical center and is now among the 34 doctors at Kennedy University Hospital who specialize in neurology.

In his more than 30 years of practice, Dr. Shiva Gopal Vasishta has gained expansive knowledge on neurological, nervous system and other disorders that affect the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, and muscles. He also treats diseases associated with the involuntary nervous system that controls the brain and some muscular organs such as the heart and lungs. In addition to treating these diseases, he treats other general illnesses such as headaches, seizures, stroke, and epilepsy, sleep disorders and multiple sclerosis among others.

Most recently a research in multiple sclerosis (MS) treatment shows that the MS drugs in the market have a lower curative efficiency that they are thought to have. The research shows that a one-time treatment with a high-dose immunosuppressive therapy and autologous hematopoietic cell transplant is more effective that the long-term treatment with MS drugs. The body’s immunity was suppressed after the collection of the patient’s stem cells that were later injected into the body after the treatment. The body’s immunity was suppressed after the collection of the patient’s stem cells that were later injected into the body after the treatment. Even though a few of the patients showed no improvements most of the patients shown progress, their relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis remained in remission in the five years and some of them regained some of the lost abilities.

The research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is hope that there could be the better treatment for the drug-resistant multiple sclerosis that has made many people lose hope. Eventually, the research’s findings need further research but it is a good to start when it comes to better treatment and diagnosis of the disease.